


The Sound That Butterflies Make

by Catchclaw



Series: Mental Mimosa [197]
Category: Sherlock Holmes (Downey films)
Genre: Feelings Realization, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pining, Schmoop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-09-05 17:16:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16815016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: “Please,” Sherlock Holmes said again, and oh, this was indeed a night of great firsts. “It’s only a few hours until dawn. Would you stay with me? When the sun rises, I promise to release you.”





	The Sound That Butterflies Make

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Stay the night. Please.

“Stay the night. Please.”

Holmes's wounds had all been bound when he said it, a moderate lot of medicinal succor applied. The lamplight was low; indeed, my hand was upon it to turn it out, leaving only the flicker of the fireside. His eyes were closed again, as they had been the moment he’d let me peel back the covers and see the extent of the damage the ruffians had done to his flesh.

“They didn’t catch me unawares, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he’d said as I reached for my needle an hour before, as I went at him with surgeon’s thread and iodine. “I knew perfectly well they were there.”

“Of course you did.”

“It was merely the size of their company took me somewhat aback.”

“How many were there?” I’d asked because he wanted me to, because he was biting his lip pale as I set to my bloody work.

He let out a great sigh. “A dozen.”

“And yet somehow they didn’t manage to kill you?”

“Ah, but killing me, old boy, was not their intent."

“What was it, then?” I felt a bubble of rage in my chest and I swallowed hard, and again; if I allowed myself to get angry, I’d be of no use to him.

“It was,” Sherlock Holmes said with an exhausted air of the dramatic, “to terrify me sufficiently to make me give up this case.”

“Is it me,” I said, slipping the sharp in and through, “or does no good come ever from you working for royalty?”

“You have made that argument before, as I recall.”

“As I recall, the last time you consulted for a king you came away with a broken arm, two black eyes, and a rather impressive concussion, yes?”

“Yes,” Holmes said, “and a very impressive check.”

I tied off one wound and reached for another. “Is it a matter of finances, then? I’d have happily advanced you the rent if that were so much of a worry.”

He grumbled. “I’m in enough debt to you as it is, Watson.”

“I’ll take red ink over blood any day.”

Holmes was quiet for a moment. And then he said: “It wasn’t only the money. The little problem in and of itself is quite interesting.”

“I should damn well hope so. You’ve ruined these sheets.” I could keep the anger from my voice no longer. “Another quarter of an hour, man, and you might have bled past the point of no return. There might've been no saving you.”

“Nonsense. My bandages, crude they may be to your medical eye, were holding perfectly steady.”

There was a lightness in his tone that I despised, that I wanted to shake him for. Here he lay, one of the finest minds of our generation, his flesh gouged in a half dozen places, slice through in still more; his skin cool, his expression glassy, and still, I had the distinct impression he saw what had happened that night as a lark--more as an adventure to be boasted about in better days than something that by all rights should have killed him.

“You’re a fool,” I said with passion. “A careless, selfish fool, taking yourself alone into a situation like that! Why didn’t you call for me to come with you, at least?”

Here he opened one eye, like Odysseus’s giant of old. “You envy me my wounds, Watson?”

“Envy--!” I stopped my hand, left the needle dangling, and leaned towards his face. “You keep talking like that and I might be tempted to add to your awful collection, how’s that!”

“Watson--”

“No,” I said, “damn you, answer me. What on God’s green earth made you venture into that house alone?”

Something fluttered across his visage, an odd, offtune expression that I could not decipher, but his words, when they came, were exactly as I’d expected:

“You were otherwise engaged this evening,” he said. “With your young lady, yes? You’ve not let me forget about that all week.”

The content of his speech I may have anticipated--that Holmes did not approve of such an outing when the game was afoot, he had made eminently apparent--but the tone in which was delivered was not. There was no accusation, no anger; indeed, no teasing. No, my friend Sherlock Holmes sounded hurt.

I gripped the edge of the ruined bedclothes. “You can’t be serious.”

Both of his eyes were open now, the whole of that gaze dimmed by pain trained upon me. “This is the fourth time that you’ve seen her. And tonight in dress clothes, no less; I should think that the very definition of serious.”

“Even so,” I said, some color coming to my cheeks, “I could have canceled. The young lady would have understood; she knows something of our business, generally speaking. You should have at the very least asked and not presumed to know my answer for me.”

“Oh, Watson,” he said, as if I were the daftest man in the world, “if I’d asked, you’d have come.”

“How do you know that?”

His hand found my forearm and wrapped itself around tight, skin against skin. “I know you as I know myself.”

There was a current between us, something like oil to match, and I was all at once aware of our proximity, not to mention our location; in all our long years of rooming together, I could count the number of times he’d allowed me in his bedroom on one hand, and never before had I been near his bed, much less bent over it, the smell of blood thick in the room mixed with laudanum and my cologne and the bitter sting of his sweat.

He lay before me battered and bleeding, the last of his bandages weeping and waiting for suture. His face was pale, his eyes shuttered, but his grip was unwavering--as was my sudden, awful desire to press my mouth against his, to mingle the last taste of wine in my throat with the soft drag of opiates I might lick from his teeth.

And worst of all, worst, was that I could see in him the same desire, the same aching need--and I knew in that moment, like a stroke of bold lightning, that what I was seeing in him for the first time on this terrible night had always been there; had I but looked before, studied him with the same scrutiny he afforded me, I would have seen it in Sherlock and perhaps even come to know it in myself.

“Sherlock,” I said with a kind of quiet desperation. “God, Sherlock, I--!”

He stopped me with a hand on my chest, a shove of his bruised palm. “Would you mind terribly sewing me up, please? It would be embarrassing for both of us if I were to fade away now, don’t you think?”

I nodded, my lips like sudden dry cotton. “Ah, yes,” I managed. “So it would."

He let me work in silence then, the only sound in the room that of the fire behind the grate, of his own shallow, steady breathing, the roar of my awakened heart.

When at last it was done, I fussed about him for some minutes, fetching him fresh linens, another pillow, and the afghan he was so fond of from the back of the couch.

“Here’s the bell,” I said, setting it on the small table next to the bed. “Any change, any pain, ring it at once and I’ll come.”

He chuckled, his lashes on his cheeks. “Yes, doctor.”

I reached for the lamp, dimmed it almost to black, and moved to the door. “Good night, Sherlock.”

“John?”

I startled. The man never called me by Christian name. Never. And yet here it fell easily, as if he spoke it every day.

“Yes?”

A hesitation, a sharp intake of pained breath. “Stay the night. Please.”

“I don’t--?”

“Please,” Sherlock Holmes said again, and oh, this was indeed a night of great firsts. “It’s only a few hours until dawn. Would you stay with me? When the sun rises, I promise to release you.”

My heart was in my throat and there was a heat in my center, a slow molasses of want that made me tremble. “Not really room in there for two, old boy.”

“John.” Softer now, a sort of shadowing pleading. “Sit here, won’t you? Just until it’s light.”

My feet moved while the words were still in the air and I settled back into the thin wooden chair beside the bed.

“Come,” I said. “Give me your hand.”

His found mine, squeezed it, and without thinking I brought it to my lips, laid a kiss along its tender knuckles, its back.

There would come a time, I knew then as clearly as if I’d already lived it, when Holmes and I would be here again, our hands clasped near his bed, and he would use his iron grip to pull me down into its softness, our bodies fiercely entwined, and yet he would sigh when I kissed him, the sound that butterflies make; sigh and open himself to me utterly, knowing fully that I’d do the same.

“I feel I should comment on your bedside manner,” Holmes murmured, a half-step from sleep, “but I fear that between the opiates and the drug of your proximity, my dear fellow, it will have to keep for another time.”

And so, fair reader, it did.


End file.
